Prayer is not saying words

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The true content of prayer is not expressed in what is said, whence, among other things, the great mistake of analyzing prayer on the basis of the apparent content of the discourse, and the distinction between the prayer of petition, of praise, of intercession, etc. That sort of thing can be useful from the pedagogical point of view, but it falsifies the true nature of prayer.
Prayer is not a discourse. It is a form of life, the life with God. That is why it is not confined to the moment of verbal statement. The latter (verbalization) can only be the secondary expression of the relationship with God, an overflow from the encounter between the living God and the living person.

Prayer is not to be analyzed like a language. It has none of that form or content, for it receives its content, not from what I have to say, but from the One to whom it is spoken. For prayer to be what it is meant to be, it depends on Him and not on me, still less on my ability to speak the adequate language. Of course, I can pronounce a discourse supposedly addressed to God. I can arrange the sentences, but it is neither the harmony of the form, nor the elevation of the content, nor the fullness of the information which turns it into a prayer. Insofar as it remains a discourse, it is in fact subject to the language analysis with which we are familiar, but that is always as discourse, that is to say, as “nonprayer.”

It becomes prayer by the decision of God to whom it is addressed. A transformation takes place whereby it is a prayer of Christ or a prayer of the Holy Spirit. That is how we should understand the famous statement of Paul, in which he says that in the last analysis we do not know what the content of our prayer should be (Romans 8:26, 27), but that the Holy Spirit himself “intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” This phrase has too often been interpreted as though the Holy Spirit added a little something to our prayer. That is quite incorrect. It is the entire prayer which is the prayer of the Holy Spirit. Only when the Holy Spirit intercedes, and in a way which cannot be expressed, that is, which transcends all verbalizing, all language, then is the prayer prayer, and it is a relationship with God. Prayer is a gift from God, and its reality depends upon Him alone.

Jacques Ellul

From: Prayer and Modern Man. New York: Seabury Press. 1970.

Bangladesh: Pilgrims beat Bible Student

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Pilgrims to a massive Islamic conference near this capital city on Sunday (Feb. 1) beat and threatened to kill a Bible school student as he distributed Christian literature.

 

Rajen Murmo, 20, a student at Believers’ Church Bible College, was distributing the 32-page books among Muslims near the school along with 25 other students in Uttara town in northern Dhaka, just a few kilometers from the banks of a river in Tongi, where the government claimed 4 million Muslim pilgrims had gathered. They had massed for the annual, three-day World Muslim Congregation (Bishwa Ijtema).

 

Murmo said that a man with a ragged beard in a loose white garment and white trousers approached the students and told them Muslims did not abide by the Bible because the Quran had superseded it, rendering it outdated.

 

“Suddenly some of his outrageous entourage grasped me and asked where I got the books and who gave me the books. They wanted to know the address of my religious leaders and mission, but I did not give them the address,” said Murmo.

 

“If I had given them the address of the Bible college, they would have destroyed it. My blank denial to give information to them made them enraged, and they started beating me. They told me if I do not give the address of the religious leaders and mission, they would kill me.”

 

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Gospel of Prayer 04

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“Get Up And Pray!”

 

One day I was at a conference with Dr. V. Raymond Edman of Wheaton College, one of the greatest Christian educators in this country. He told us of an experience he had while he was in Ecuador as a missionary. He hadn’t been there long before he was sick and dying. He was so near death that they had already dug his grave. He had great beads of sweat on his brow and there was a death rattle in his throat. But suddenly he sat straight up in bed and said to his wife, “Bring me my clothes!” Nobody knew what had happened.

Many years later he was retelling the story in Boston. Afterward, a little old lady with a small, dog-eared, beaten-up book, approached him and asked, “What day did you say you were dying? What time was it in Ecuador? What time would it be in Boston?” When he answered her, her wrinkled face lit up. Pointing to her book, she said. “There it is, you see? At 2 a.m. God said to get up and pray – the devil’s trying to kill Raymond Edman in Ecuador.” And she’d gotten up and prayed.

 

Duncan Campbell told the story of hearing a farmer in his field who was praying. He was praying about Greece. Afterward, he asked him why he was praying. The man said, “I don’t know. I had a burden in the spirit and God said, ‘You pray; there’s someone in Greece that is in a bad situation.’ I prayed until I got a release.”

Two or three years later the farmer was in a meeting listening to a missionary. The man described a time when he was working in Greece. He had been in serious trouble. The time? Two or three years ago. The men compared notes and discovered that it was the very same day that God had burdened a farmer, on a little island off the coast of Scotland, to pray for a man in Greece whose name he didn’t even know.

 

It may seem the Lord gives you strange things. I don’t care. If the Lord tells you something, carry on with what the Lord tells you.